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Review: Happy Birthday to You by Brian Rowe

Newlyweds Cameron and Liesel Martin aren't able to celebrate their wedding bliss for long. Not only is Liesel unexpectedly pregnant... they're also facing the end of humanity!Liesel's evil witch sister Hannah has cast a spell to make all humans on Earth age a whole year with every day. It's up to Cameron and Liesel to stop her... and save the world! Who will survive? And who will perish?

The first two books in this series were laugh out loud funny and fantastically romantic and I loved them. I loved this one just as much, but it was very different, it was intense and a lot darker. There are a lot of deaths in it and in a way it reminded me of gritty, end-of-the-world books in that it showed the darker side of the human psyche at times, some of the deaths were gruesome and funny, it was kind of like a sick joke and whilst it was different to the first two book and some readers may be annoyed by this, I welcomed the change in tone.

In this installment we see Liesl and Cameron racing against this time to stop the rapid aging of everybody but them, it's different because here Cameron is a lot more active in this one and I liked to see him be the hero, both of the main characters seemed a lot more mature in this book, which went well with the change in tone and I liked to see. Hannah was a great bad guy, she really is an evil witch and I also liked the introduction of their adopted sister, who served as a smaller but still important bad guy in the storyline. The other characters, like Kimber, Cam's younger sister and Wesley, his best friend also pop up as main characters and we get to read from their points of view.

There are some pretty crazy twists in this book, I won't describe any for fear of spoilers but there's one at the end of the book that left me with tears falling and some more during the book that I seriously hoped were going to turn out to not be true. I loved the pacing - it was quick and action packed read, and I think that the change in tone really showed Rowe's versatility as an author.

Overall, a fantastic end to a serious that I have completely loved. I would recommend this series to absolutely anybody, even my worst enemy.